500 words

Who is the average video game player? Since the birth and growth of the games industry there has been a large shift in the core gaming demographic. It may have started as a small collective group of gamers but today is has burst into an enormous worldwide fan base which can no longer be labelled with a visual or gender specific stereotype. Video games are played and adored by a vast array of people from all ends of the globe and with new game releases being let lose to the general public every month, the already booming gamer demographic only has one way to go. Up.  In a recent poll it was recorded that thirty two percent of gamers are under the age of eighteen, thirty one percent are between the age of eighteen to thirty five and thirty seven percent are from the age of thirty six and up. This means that the average video game player is roughly thirty years of age and as time progresses, this age average is rising due to the fact that these thirty year olds used to be the children that first played video games. Whether it was on a basic home computer, game console or arcade machine, these fans were present at the very beginning of the gaming timeline. They followed it along as it began to blossom and bloom into the billion dollar industry it is today and continued their devotion to playing video games, just on a far more advanced piece of technology.

The constant advancement in technology has played a huge part in the progression of digital gaming throughout its development process.  With a new influx of devices being invented within the last decade, the availability of video games for the general public has become far more accessible. There is now a vast array of different platforms on which people can use to play games, for example Nintendo’s first game boy was released on April 21^st, 1989 and allowed users to use simply push in a game cartridge into the chunky rectangular device and take it with them where ever they went, allowing you to play games portably instead of being rooted at home. In more recent technological advancements the first Apple IPhone was released on the 29^th of June 2007 and had the capabilities for users to access a large variety of game based applications with a tap of an icon, making playing games quick and convenient due to them being on a device that people are known to use frequently on a daily basis. This technological device inventing leap has now given the general public a large amount of choice when it comes to what piece of technology to purchase and has also introduced and given a broader range of people the opportunity to play games, whether it is a quick session of the mobile app ‘Angry Birds’ whilst commuting in the morning or going online to discover a large expansive role playing game like ‘World of Warcraft.’